CHAPTER XXXI.----HENRY II. (1547-1559.)

[Illustration: GALLERY HENRY II----230]

Henry II. had all the defects, and, with the exception of personal

bravery, not one amongst the brilliant and amiable qualities of the king

his father. Like Francis I., he was rash and reckless in his resolves

and enterprises, but without having the promptness, the fertility, and

the suppleness of mind which Francis I. displayed in getting out of the

awkward positions in which he had placed himself, and in stalling off or

mitigating the consequences of them. Henry was as cold and ungenial as

Francis had been gracious and able to please: and whilst Francis I., even

if he were a bad master to himself, was at any rate his own master, Henry

II. submitted without resistance, and probably without knowing it, to the

influence of the favorite who reigned in his house as well as in his

court, and of the advisers who were predominant in his government. Two

facts will suffice to set in a clear light, at the commencement of the

new reign, this regrettable analogy in the defects, and this profound

diversity in the mind, character, and conduct of the two kings.

Towards the close of 1542, a grievous aggravation of the tax upon salt,

called Babel, caused a violent insurrection in the town of Rochelle,

which was exempted, it was said, by its traditional privileges from that

impost. Not only was payment refused, but the commissioners were

maltreated and driven away. Francis I. considered the matter grave

enough to require his presence for its repression. He repaired to

Rochelle with a numerous body of lanzknechts. The terrified population

appeared to have determined upon submission, and, having assembled in a

mass at the town-hall, there awaited anxiously the king’s arrival. On

the 1st of January, 1543, Francis I. entered the town in state,

surrounded by his escort. The people’s advocate fell on his knees, and

appealed to the king’s clemency in dealing with a revolt of which every

one repented. The king, who was seated on a wooden boarding, rose up.

“Speak we no more of revolt,” said he; “I desire neither to destroy your

persons nor to seize your goods, as was lately done by the Emperor

Charles to the Ghentese, whereby his hands are stained with blood; I long

more for the hearts of my subjects than for their lives and their riches.

I will never at any time of my life think again of your offence, and I

pardon you without excepting a single thing. I desire that the keys of

your city and your arms be given back to you, and that you be completely

reinstated in your liberties and your privileges.” The cheers of the

people responded to these words of the king. “I think I have won your

hearts,” said the king on retiring; “and I assure you, on the honor of a

gentleman, that you have mine. I desire that you ring your bells, for

you are pardoned.” The Rochellese were let off for a fine of two hundred

thousand francs, which the king gave to his keeper of the seals, Francis

de Montholon, whom he wished to compensate for his good service. The

keeper of the seals in his turn made a present of them to the town of

Rochelle to found a hospital. But the ordinances as to the salt-tax were

maintained in principle, and their extension led, some years afterwards,

to a rising of a more serious character, and very differently repressed.

In 1548, hardly a year after the accession of Henry II., and in the midst

of the rejoicings he had gone to be present at in the north of Italy, he

received news at Turin to the effect that in Guienne, Angoumois, and

Saintonge a violent and pretty general insurrection had broken out

against the salt-tax, which Francis I., shortly before his death, had made

heavier in these provinces. The local authorities in vain attempted to

repress the rising; the insurgent peasants scoured the country in strong

bodies, giving free rein not only to their desires, but also to their

revengeful feelings; the most atrocious excesses of which a mob is

capable were committed; the director-general of the gabel was massacred

cruelly; and two of his officers, at Angouleme, were strapped down stark

naked on a table, beaten to death, and had their bodies cast into the

river with the insulting remark, “Go, wicked gabellers, and salt the fish

of the Charente.” The King of Navarre’s lieutenant, being appealed to

for aid, summoned, but to no purpose, the Parliament of Bordeaux; he was

forced to take refuge in Chateau-Trompette, and was massacred by the

populace whilst he was trying to get out; the president of the

Parliament, a most worthy magistrate, and very much beloved, it is said,

by the people, only saved his own life by taking the oath prescribed by

the insurgents. “This news,” says Vieilleville, in his contemporary

_Memoires,_ “grievously afflicted the king; and the Constable de

Montmorency represented to him that it was not the first time that these

people had been capricious, rebellious, and mutinous; for that in the

reign of his lord and father, the late king, the Rochellese and

surrounding districts had forgotten themselves in like manner. They

ought to be exterminated, and, in case of need, be replaced by a new

colony, that they might never return. The said sir constable offered to

take the matter in hand, and with ten companies of the old hands whom he

would raise in Piedmont, and as many lanzknechts, a thousand men-at-arms

all told, he promised to exact a full account, and satisfy his Majesty.”

Montmorency was as good as his word. When he arrived with his troops in

Guienne, the people of Bordeaux, in a fit of terror, sent to Langon a

large boat, most magnificently fitted up, in which were chambers and

saloons emblazoned with the arms of the said sir constable, with three or

four deputies to present it to him, and beg him to embark upon it, and

drop down to their city. He repulsed them indignantly. “Away, away,”

said he, “with your boat and your keys; I will have nought to do with

them; I have others here with me which will make me other kind of opening

than yours. I will have you all hanged; I will teach you to rebel

against your king and murder his governor and his lieutenant.” And he

did, in fact, enter Bordeaux on the 9th of October, 1548, by a breach

which he had opened in the walls, and, after having traversed the city

between two lines of soldiers and with his guns bearing on the suspected

points, he ordered the inhabitants to bring all their arms to the

citadel. Executions followed immediately after this moral as well as

material victory. “More than a hundred and forty persons were put to

death by various kinds of punishments,” says Vieilleville; “and, by a

most equitable sentence, when the executioner had in his hands the three

insurgents who had beaten to death and thrown into the river the two

collectors of the Babel at Angouleme, he cast them all three into a fire

which was ready at the spot, and said to them aloud, in conformity with

the judgment against them, ‘Go, rabid hounds, and grill the fish of the

Charente, which ye salted with the bodies of the officers of your king

and sovereign lord.’ As to civil death (loss of civil rights),” adds

Vieilleville, “nearly all the inhabitants made honorable amends in open

street, on their knees, before the said my lords at the window, crying

mercy and asking pardon; and more than a hundred, because of their youth,

were simply whipped. Astounding fines and interdictions were laid as

well upon the body composing the court of Parliament as upon the

town-council and on a great number of private individuals. The very

bells were not exempt from experiencing the wrath and vengeance of the

prince, for not a single one remained throughout the whole city or in the

open country--to say nothing of the clocks, which were not spared either

--which was not broken up and confiscated to the king’s service for his

guns.”

The insurrection at Bordeaux against the gabel in 1548 was certainly more

serious than that of Rochelle in 1542; but it is also quite certain that

Francis I. would not have set about repressing it as Henry II. did; he

would have appeared there himself and risked his own person instead of

leaving the matter to the harshest of his lieutenants, and he would have

more skilfully intermingled generosity with force, and kind words with

acts of severity. And that is one of the secrets of governing. In 1549,

scarcely a year after the revolt at Bordeaux, Henry II., then at Amiens,

granted to deputies from Poitou, Rochelle, the district of Aunis,

Limousin, Perigord, and Saintonge, almost complete abolition of the Babel

in Guienne, which paid the king, by way of compensation, two hundred

thousand crowns of gold for the expenses of war or the redemption of

certain alienated domains. We may admit that on the day after the revolt

the arbitrary and bloody proceedings of the Constable de Montmorency must

have produced upon the insurgents of Bordeaux the effect of a salutary

fright; but we may doubt whether so cruel a repression was absolutely

indispensable in 1548, when in 1549 the concession demanded in the former

year was to be recognized as necessary.

According to De Thou and the majority of historians, it was on the

occasion of the insurrection in Guienne against the Babel that Stephen

de la Boetie, the young and intimate friend of Montaigne, wrote his

celebrated _Discours de la Servitude voluntaire, ou le Contre-un,_ an

eloquent declamation against monarchy. But the testimony of Montaigne

himself upsets the theory of this coincidence; written in his own hand

upon a manuscript, partly autograph, of the treatise by De la Boetie, is

a statement that it was the work “of a lad of sixteen.” La Boetie was

born at Sarlat on the 1st of November, 1530, and was, therefore, sixteen

in 1546, two years before the insurrection at Bordeaux. The _Contre-un,_

besides, is a work of pure theory and general philosophy, containing no

allusion at all to the events of the day, to the sedition in Guienne no

more than to any other. This little work owed to Montaigne’s

affectionate regard for its author a great portion of its celebrity.

Published for the first time, in 1578, in the _Memoires de l’Etat de

France,_ after having up to that time run its course without any author’s

name, any title, or any date, it was soon afterwards so completely

forgotten that when, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Cardinal

de Richelieu for the first time heard it mentioned, and “sent one of his

gentlemen over the whole street of Saint-Jacques to inquire for _la

Servitude volontaire,_ all the publishers said, ‘We don’t know what it

is.’ The son of one of them recollected something about it, and said to

the cardinal’s gentleman, ‘Sir, there is a book-fancier who has what you

seek, but with no covers to it, and he wants five pistoles for it.’

‘Very well,’ said the gentleman;” and the Cardinal do Richelieu paid

fifty francs for the pleasure of reading the little political pamphlet by

“a lad of sixteen,” which probably made very little impression upon him,

but which, thanks to the elegance and vivacity of its style, and the

affectionate admiration of the greatest independent thinker of the

sixteenth century, has found a place in the history of French literature.

[_Memoires de Tallemant des Reaux,_ t. i. p. 395.]

[Illustration: Anne de Montmorency----235]

History must do justice even to the men whose brutal violence she

stigmatizes and reproves. In the case of Anne do Montmorency it often

took the form of threats intended to save him from the necessity of acts.

When he came upon a scene of any great confusion and disorder, “Go hang

me such an one,” he would say; “tie yon fellow to that tree; despatch

this fellow with pikes and arquebuses, this very minute, right before my

eyes; cut me in pieces all those rascals who chose to hold such a

clock-case as this against the king; burn me yonder village; light me up

a blaze everywhere, for a quarter of a mile all round.” The same man

paid the greatest attention to the discipline and good condition of his

troops, in order to save the populations from their requisitions and

excesses. “On the 20th of November, 1549, he obtained and published at

Paris,” says De Thou, “a proclamation from the king doubling the pay of

the men-at-arms, arquebusiers and light-horse, and forbidding them at the

same time, on pain of death, to take anything without paying for it. A

bad habit had introduced itself amongst the troops, whether they were

going on service or returning, whether they were in the field or in

winter quarters, of keeping themselves at the expense of those amongst

whom they lived. Thence proceeded an infinity of irregularities and

losses in the towns and in the country, wherein the people had to suffer

at the hands of an insolent soldiery the same vexatious as if it had been

an enemy’s country. Not only was a stop put to such excesses, but care

was further taken that the people should not be oppressed under pretext

of recruitments which had to be carried out.” [_Histoire de J. A. de

Thou,_ t. i. p. 367.] A nephew of the Constable de Montmorency, a young

man of twenty-three, who at a later period became Admiral de Coligny, was

ordered to see to the execution of these protective measures, and he drew

up, between 1550 and 1552, at first for his own regiment of foot, and

afterwards as colonel-general of this army, rules of military discipline

which remained for a long while in force.

There was war in the atmosphere. The king and his advisers, the court

and the people, had their minds almost equally full of it, some in sheer

dread, and others with an eye to preparation. The reign of Francis I.

had ended mournfully; the peace of Crespy had hurt the feelings both of

royalty and of the nation; Henry, now king, had, as dauphin, felt called

upon to disavow it. It had left England in possession of Calais and

Boulogne, and confirmed the dominion or ascendency of Charles V. in

Germany, Italy, and Spain, on all the French frontiers. How was the

struggle to be recommenced? What course must be adopted to sustain it

successfully? To fall back upon, there were the seven provincial

legions, which had been formed by Francis I. for Normandy, Picardy,

Burgundy, Dauphiny, and Provence united, Languedoc, Guienne, and

Brittany; but they were not like permanent troops, drilled and always

ready; they were recruited by voluntary enlistment; they generally

remained at their own homes, receiving compensation at review time and

high pay in time of war. The Constable de Montmorency had no confidence

in these legions; he spoke of them contemptuously, and would much rather

have increased the number of the foreign corps, regularly paid and kept

up, Swiss or lanzknechts. Two systems of policy and warfare, moreover,

divided the king’s council into two: Montmorency, now old and worn out in

body and mind (he was born in 1492, and so was sixty in 1552), was for a

purely defensive attitude, no adventures or battles to be sought, but

victuals and all sorts of supplies to be destroyed in the provinces which

might be invaded by the enemy, so that instead of winning victories there

he might not even be able to live there. In 1536 this system had been

found successful by the constable in causing the failure of Charles V.’s

invasion of Provence; but in 1550 a new generation had come into the

world, the court, and the army; it comprised young men full of ardor and

already distinguished for their capacity and valor; Francis de Lorraine,

Duke of Guise (born at the castle of Bar, February 17, 1519), was

thirty-one; his brother, Charles de Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, was only

six-and-twenty (he was born at Joinville, February 17, 1524); Francis de

Scepeaux (born at Durdtal, Anjou, in 1510), who afterwards became Marshal

de Vieilleville, was at this time nearly forty; but he had contributed in

1541 to the victory of Ceresole, and Francis I. had made so much of it

that he had said, on presenting him to his son Henry, “He is no older

than you, and see what he has done already; if the wars do not swallow

him up, you will some day make him constable or marshal of France.”

Gaspard de Coligny (born at Chatillon-sur-Loing, February 16, 1517) was

thirty-three; and his brother, Francis d’Andelot (born at Chatillon, in

1521), twenty-nine. These men, warriors and politicians at one and the

same time, in a high social position and in the flower of their age,

could not reconcile themselves to the Constable de Montmorency’s system,

defensive solely and prudential to the verge of inertness; they thought

that, in order to repair the reverses of France and for the sake of their

own fame, there was something else to be done, and they impatiently

awaited the opportunity.

[Illustration: Henry II.----235]

It was not long coming. At the close of 1551, a deputation of the

Protestant princes of Germany came to Fontainebleau to ask for the king’s

support against the aggressive and persecuting despotism of Charles V.

The Count of Nassau made a speech “very long,” says Vieilleville in his

_Memoires,_ “at the same time that it was in very elegant language,

whereby all the presence received very great contentment.” Next day the

king put the demand before his council for consideration, and expressed

at the very outset his own opinion that “in the present state of affairs,

he ought not to take up any enterprise, but leave his subjects of all

conditions to rest; for generally,” said he, “all have suffered and do

suffer when armies pass and repass so often through my kingdom, which

cannot be done without pitiable oppression and trampling-down of the poor

people.” The constable, “without respect of persons,” says Vieilleville,

“following his custom of not giving way to anybody, forthwith began to

speak, saying that the king, who asked counsel of them, had very plainly

given it them himself and made them very clearly to understand his own

idea, which ought to be followed point by point without any gainsaying,

he having said nothing but what was most equitable and well known to the

company.” Nearly all the members of the council gave in their adhesion,

without comment, to the opinion of the king and the constable. “But when

it came to the turn of M. de Vieilleville, who had adopted the language

of the Count of Nassau,” he unhesitatingly expressed a contrary opinion,

unfolding all the reasons which the king had for being distrustful of the

emperor and for not letting this chance of enfeebling him slip by. “May

it please your Majesty,” said he, “to remember his late passage through

France, to obtain which the emperor submitted to carteblanche;

nevertheless, when he was well out of the kingdom, he laughed at all his

promises, and, when he found himself inside Cambrai, he said to the

Prince of Infantado, ‘Let not the King of France, if he be wise, put

himself at my mercy, as I have been at his, for I swear by the living God

that he shall not be quit for Burgundy and Champagne; but I would also

insist upon Picardy and the key of the road to the Bastille of Paris,

unless he were minded to lose his life or be confined in perpetual

imprisonment until the whole of my wish were accomplished.’ Since thus

it is, sir, and the emperor makes war upon you covertly, it must be made

upon him overtly, without concealing one’s game or dissimulating at all.

No excuses must be allowed on the score of neediness, for France is

inexhaustible, if only by voluntary loans raised on the most comfortable

classes of the realm. As for me, I consider myself one of the poorest of

the company, or at any rate one of the least comfortable; but yet I have

some fifteen thousand francs’ worth of plate, dinner and dessert, white

and red [silver and gold], which I hereby offer to place in the hands of

whomsoever you shall appoint, in order to contribute to the expenses of

so laudable an enterprise as this. Putting off, moreover, for the

present the communication to you of a certain secret matter which one of

the chiefs of this embassy hath told me; and I am certain that when you

have discovered it, you will employ all your might and means to carry out

that which I propose to you.”

The king asked Vieilleville what this secret matter was which he was

keeping back. “If it please your Majesty to withdraw apart, I will tell

it you,” said Vieilleville. All the council rose; and Vieilleville,

approaching his Majesty, who called the constable only to his side, said,

“Sir, you are well aware how the emperor got himself possessed of the

imperial cities of Cambrai, Utrecht, and Liege, which he has incorporated

with his own countship of Flanders, to the great detriment of the whole

of Germany. The electoral princes of the holy empire have discovered

that he has a project in his mind of doing just the same with the

imperial cities of Metz, Strasbourg, Toul, Verdun, and such other towns

on the Rhine as he shall be able to get hold of. They have secretly

adopted the idea of throwing themselves upon your resources, without

which they cannot stop this detestable design, which would be the total

ruin of the empire and a manifest loss to your kingdom. Wherefore, take

possession of the said towns, since opportunity offers, which will be

about forty leagues of country gained without the loss of a single man,

and an impregnable rampart for Champagne and Picardy; and, besides, a

fine and perfectly open road into the heart of the duchy of Luxembourg

and the districts below it as far as Brussels.”

However pacific the king’s first words had been, and whatever was the

influence of the constable, the proposal of Vieilleville had a great

effect upon the council. The king showed great readiness to adopt it.

“I think,” said he to the constable, “that I was inspired of God when I

created Vieilleville of my council to-day.” “I only gave the opinion I

did,” replied Montmorency, “in order to support the king’s sentiments;

let your Majesty give what orders you please.” The king loudly

proclaimed his resolve. “Then let every one,” he said, “be ready at an

early date, with equipment according to his ability and means, to follow

me; hoping, with God’s help, that all will go well for the discomfiture

of so pernicious a foe of my kingdom and nation, and one who revels and

delights in tormenting all manner of folks, without regard for any.”

There was a general enthusiasm; the place of meeting for the army was

appointed at Chalons-sur-Marne, March 10, 1552; more than a thousand

gentlemen flocked thither as volunteers; peasants and mechanics from

Champagne and Picardy joined them; the war was popular. “The majority of

the soldiers,” says Rabutin, a contemporary chronicler, “were young men

whose brains were on fire.” Francis de Guise and Gaspard de Coligny were

their chief leaders. The king entered Lorraine from Champagne by

Joinville, the ordinary residence of the Dukes of Guise. He carried

Pont-a-Mousson; Toul opened its gates to him on the 13th of April; he

occupied Nancy on the 14th, and on the 18th he entered Metz, not without

some hesitation amongst a portion of the inhabitants and the necessity of

a certain show of military force on the part of the leaders of the royal

army. The king would have given the command of this important place to

Vieilleville, but he refused it, saying, “I humbly thank your Majesty,

but I do not think that you should establish in Metz any governor in your

own name, but leave that duty to the mayor and sheriffs of the city,

under whose orders the eight captains of the old train-bands who will

remain there with their companies will be.” “How say you!” said the

king: “can I leave a foreign lieutenant in a foreign country whose oath

of fidelity I have only had within the last four-and-twenty hours, and

with all the difficulties and disputes in the world to meet too?” “Sir,”

rejoined Vieilleville, “to fear that this master sheriff, whose name is

Tallanges, might possibly do you a bad turn, is to wrongly estimate his

own competence, who never put his nose anywhere but into a bar-parlor to

drink himself drunk; and it is also to show distrust of the excellent

means you have for preventing all the ruses and artifices that might be

invented to throw your service into confusion.” The king acquiesced, but

not without anxiety, in Vieilleville’s refusal, and, leaving at Metz as

governor a relative of the constable’s, whom the latter warmly

recommended to him, he set out on the 22d of April, 1552, with all his

household, to go and attempt in Alsace the same process that he had

already carried out in Lorraine. “But when we had entered upon the

territory of Germany,” says Vieilleville, “our Frenchmen at once showed

their insolence in their very first quarters, which so alarmed all the

rest that we never found from that moment a single man to speak to, and,

as long as the expedition lasted, there never appeared a soul with his

provisions to sell on the road; whereby the army suffered infinite

privations. This misfortune began with us at the approach to Saverne

(Zabern), the episcopal residence of Strasbourg.” When the king arrived

before Strasbourg he found the gates closed, and the only offer to open

them was on the condition that he should enter alone with forty persons

for his whole suite. The constable, having taken a rash fit, was of

opinion that he should enter even on this condition. This advice was

considered by his Majesty to be very sound, as well as by the princes and

lords who were about him, according to the natural tendency of the

Frenchman, who is always for seconding and applauding what is said by the

great. But Vieilleville, on being summoned to the king’s quarters,

opposed it strongly. “Sir,” said he, “break this purpose, for in

carrying it out you are in danger of incurring some very evil and very

shameful fate; and, should that happen, what will become of your army

which will be left without head, prince, or captain, and in a strange

country, wherein we are already looked upon with ill will because of our

insolence and indiscretions? As for me, I am off again to my quarters to

quaff and laugh with my two hundred men-at-arms, in readiness to march

when your standard is a-field, but not thither.” Nothing has a greater

effect upon weak and undecided minds than the firm language of men

resolved to do as they say. The king gave up the idea of entering

Strasbourg, and retired well pleased nevertheless, for he was in

possession of Metz, Toul, Verdun, and Pont-a-Mousson, the keys for France

into Germany, and at the head of an army under young commanders who were

enterprising without being blindly rash.

Charles V. also had to know what necessity was, and to submit to it,

without renouncing the totality of his designs. On the 2d of August,

1552, he signed at Passau, with the Protestant princes, the celebrated

treaty known under the name of “treaty of public peace,” which referred

the great questions of German pacification to a general diet to be

assembled in six months, and declared that, pending definitive

conciliation, the two religions should be on an equal footing in the

empire, that is, that the princes and free towns should have the supreme

regulation of religious matters amongst themselves. Charles V. thus

recovered full liberty of action in his relations with France, and could

no longer think of anything but how to recover the important towns he had

lost in Lorraine. Henry II., on the other hand, who was asked by his

Protestant allies on what conditions he would accept the peace of Passau,

replied that at no price would he dispossess himself of the

Three-Bishoprics of Lorraine, and that he would for his part continue the

contest he had undertaken for the liberation of Germany. The siege of

Metz then became the great question of the day: Charles V. made all his

preparations to conduct it on an immense scale, and Henry II.

immediately ordered Francis de Guise to go and defend his new conquest at

all hazards.

[Illustration: DIANA DE POITIERS----243]

Ambition which is really great accepts with joy great perils fraught with

great opportunities. Guise wrote to Henry II.’s favorite, Diana de

Poitiers, Duchess of Valentinois, to thank her for having helped to

obtain for him this favor, which was about to bring him “to the emperor’s

very beard.” He set out at once, first of all to Toul, where the plague

prevailed, and where he wished to hurry on the repair of the ramparts.

Money was wanting to pay the working-corps; and he himself advanced the

necessary sum. On arriving at Metz on the 17th of August, 1552, he found

there only twelve companies of infantry, new levies; and every evening he

drilled them himself in front of his quarters. A host of volunteers,

great lords, simple gentlemen, and rich and brave burgesses, soon came to

him, “eager to aid him in repelling the greatest and most powerful effort

ever made by the emperor against their country and their king.” This

concourse of warriors, the majority of them well known and several of

them distinguished, redoubled the confidence and ardor of the rank and

file in the army. We find under the title of _Chanson faite en 1552 par

un souldar etant en Metz en garnison_ this couplet:--

“My Lord of Guise is here at home,

With many a noble at his side,

With the two children of Vendome,

With bold Nemours, in all his pride,

And Strozzi too, a warrior tried,

Who ceases not, by night or day,

Around the city-walls to stride,

And strengthen Metz in every way.”

[Peter Strozzi, “the man in all the world,” says Brantome, “who

could best arrange and order battles and battalions, and could

best post them to his advantage.”]

To put into condition the tottering fortifications of Metz, and to have

the place well supplied, was the first task undertaken by its

indefatigable governor; he never ceased to meet the calls upon him either

in person or in purse; he was seen directing the workmen, taking his

meals with them, and setting them a good example by carrying the hod for

several hours. He frequently went out on horseback to reconnoitre the

country, visit the points of approach and lodgment that the enemy might

make use of around the town, and take measures of precaution at the

places whereby they might do harm as well as at those where it would be

not only advantageous for the French to make sallies or to set

ambuscades, but also to secure a retreat. Charles V., naturally slow as

he was in his operations no less than in his resolves, gave the activity

of Guise time to bear fruit. “I mean to batter the town of Metz in such

style as to knock it about the ears of M. de Guise,” said he at the end

of August, 1552, “and I make small account of the other places that the

king may have beyond that.”

[Illustration: Guise at Metz----244]

On the 15th of September following, Charles was still fifteen leagues

from Metz, on the territory of Deux-Ponts, and it was only on the 19th

of October that the Duke of Alba, his captain-general, arrived with

twenty-four thousand men, the advance-guard, within a league of the

place which, it it is said, was to be ultimately besieged by one hundred

thousand foot, twenty-three thousand horse, one hundred and twenty

pieces of artillery, and seven thousand pioneers. “After one and the

first encounter,” says a journal of the siege, “the enemy held our

soldiers in good repute, not having seen them, for any sort of danger,

advance or retreat, save as men of war and of assured courage; which was

an advantage, for M. de Guise knew well that at the commencement of a

war it was requisite that a leader should try, as much as ever he could,

to win.” It was only on the 20th of November that Charles V., ill of

gout at Thionville, and unable to stand on his legs, perceived the

necessity of being present in person at the siege, and appeared before

Metz on an Arab horse, with his face pale and worn, his eyes sunk in his

head, and his beard white. At sight of him there was a most tremendous

salute of arquebuses and artillery, the noise of which brought the whole

town to arms. The emperor, whilst waiting to establish himself at the

castle of La Horgne, took up his quarters near the Duke of Alba, in a

little wooden house built out of the ruins of the Abbey of

Saint-Clement: “a beautiful palace,” said he, “when the keys of Metz are

brought to me there.” From the 20th to the 26th the attack was

continued with redoubled vigor; fourteen thousand cannon-shots were

fired, it is said, in a single day Guise had remarked that the enemy

seemed preparing to direct the principal assault against a point so

strong that nobody had thought of pulling down the houses in its

vicinity. This oversight was immediately repaired, and a stout wall,

the height of a man, made out of the ruins. “If they send us peas,” said

Guise, “we will give them back beans” (“we will give them at least as

good as they bring “). On the 26th of November the old wall was

battered by a formidable artillery; and, breached in three places, it

crumbled down on the 28th into the ditch, “at the same time making it

difficult to climb for to come to the assault.” The assailants uttered

shouts of joy; but, when the cloud of dust had cleared off, they saw a

fresh rampart eight feet in height above the breach, “and they

experienced as much and even more disgust than they had felt pleasure at

seeing the wall tumble.” The besieged heaped mockery and insult upon

them; but Guise “imperatively put a stop to the disturbance, fearing, it

is said, lest some traitor should take advantage of it to give the

assailants some advice, and the soldiers then conceived the idea of

sticking upon the points of their pikes live cats, the cries of which

seemed to show derision of the enemy.”

The siege went on for a month longer without making any more impression;

and the imperial troops kicked against any fresh assaults. “I was wont

once upon a time to be followed to battle,” Charles V. would say, “but I

see that I have no longer men about me; I must bid farewell to the

empire, and go and shut myself up in some monastery; before three years

are over I shall turn Cordelier.” Whilst Metz was still holding out, the

fortress of Toul was summoned by the Imperialists to open its gates; but

the commandant replied, “When the town of Metz has been taken, when I

have had the honor of being besieged in due form by the emperor, and when

I have made as long a defence as the Duke of Guise has, such a summons

may be addressed to me, and I will consider what I am to do.” On the

26th of December, 1552, the sixty-fifth day since the arrival of the

imperial army and the forty-fifth since the batteries had opened fire,

Charles V. resolved to raise the siege. “I see very well,” said he,

“that fortune resembles women; she prefers a young king to an old

emperor.” His army filed off by night, in silence, leaving behind its

munitions and its tents just as they stood, “driven away, almost, by the

chastisement of Heaven,” says the contemporary chronicler Rabutin, “with

but two shots by way of signal.” The ditty of the soldier just quoted

ends thus:--

“At last, so stout was her defence,

From Metz they moved their guns away;

And, with the laugh at their expense,

A-tramping went their whole array.

And at their tail the noble Lord

Of Guise sent forth a goodly throng

Of cavalry, with lance and sword,

To teach them how to tramp along.”

Guise was far from expecting so sudden and decisive a result. “Sing me

no more flattering strains in your letters about the emperor’s

dislodgment hence,” he wrote on the 24th of December to his brother the

Cardinal of Lorraine; “take it for certain that unless we be very much

mistaken in him, he will not, as long as he has life, brook the shame of

departing hence until he has seen it all out.”

Irritated, and, perhaps, still more shocked, at so heavy a blow to his

power and his renown, Charles V. looked everywhere for a chance of taking

his revenge. He flattered himself that he had found it in Therouanne,

a fortress of importance at that time between Flanders and Artois, which

had always been a dependency of the kingdom of France, and served as a

rampart against the repeated incursions of the English, the masters of

Calais. Charles knew that it was ill supplied with troops and munitions

of war; and the court of Henry II., intoxicated with the deliverance of

Metz, spoke disdainfully of the emperor, and paid no heed to anything but

balls, festivities, and tournaments in honor of the marriage between

Diana d’Angouleme, the king’s natural daughter, and Horatio Farnese, Duke

of Castro. All on a sudden it was announced that the troops of Charles

V. were besieging Therouanne. The news was at first treated lightly; it

was thought sufficient to send to Therouanne some re-enforcements under

the orders of Francis de Montmorency, nephew of the constable; but the

attack was repulsed with spirit by the besiegers, and brave as was the

resistance offered by the besieged, who sustained for ten hours a

sanguinary assault, on the 20th of June, 1553, Francis de Montmorency saw

the impossibility of holding out longer, and, on the advice of all his

officers, offered to surrender the place; but he forgot to stipulate in

the first place for a truce; the Germans entered the town, thrown open

without terms of capitulation; it was given up as prey to an army itself

a prey to all the passions of soldiers as well as to their master’s

vengeful feelings, and Therouanne, handed over for devastation, was for a

whole month diligently demolished and razed to the ground. When Charles

V., at Brussels, received news of the capture, “bonfires were lighted

throughout Flanders; bells were rung, cannon were fired.” It was but a

poor revenge for so great a sovereign after the reverse he had just met

with at Metz; but the fall of Therouanne was a grievous incident for

France. Francis I. was in the habit of saying that Therouanne in

Flanders and Acqs (now Dax) on the frontier of Guienne were, to him, like

two pillows on which he could rest tranquilly. [_Histoire universelle,_

t. ii. p. 352.]

Whilst these events were passing in Lorraine and Flanders, Henry II. and

his advisers were obstinately persisting in the bad policy which had been

clung to by Charles VIII., Louis XII., and Francis I., that, in fact, of

making conquests and holding possessions in Italy. War continued, from

Turin to Naples, between France, the emperor, the pope, and the local

princes, with all sorts of alliances and alternations, but with no

tangible result. Blaise de Montluc defended the fortress of Sienna for

nine months against the Imperialists with an intelligence and a bravery

which earned for him twenty years later the title of Marshal of France.

Charles de Brissac was carrying on the war in Piedmont with such a

combination of valor and generosity that the king sent him as a present

his own sword, writing to him at the same time, “The opinion I have of

your merit has become rooted even amongst foreigners. The emperor says

that he would make himself monarch of the whole world if he had a Brissac

to second his plans.” His men, irritated at getting no pay, one day

surrounded Brissac, complaining vehemently. “You will always get bread

by coming to me,” said he; and he paid the debt of France by sacrificing

his daughter’s dowry and borrowing a heavy sum from the Swiss on the

security of his private fortune. It was by such devotion and such

sacrifices that the French nobility paid for and justified their

preponderance in the state; but they did not manage to succeed in the

conduct of public affairs, and to satisfy the interests of a nation

progressing in activity, riches, independence, and influence. Disquieted

at the smallness of his success in Italy, Henry II. flattered himself

that he would regain his ascendency there by sending thither the Duke of

Guise, the hero of Metz, with an army of about twenty thousand men,

French or Swiss, and a staff of experienced officers; but Guise was not

more successful than his predecessors had been. After several attempts

by arms and negotiation amongst the local sovereigns, he met with a

distinct failure in the kingdom of Naples before the fortress of

Civitella, the siege of which he was forced to raise on the 15th of May,

1557. Wearied out by want of success, sick in the midst of an army of

sick, regretting over “the pleasure of his field-sports at Joinville, and

begging his mother to have just a word or two written to him to console

him,” all he sighed for was to get back to France. And it was not long

before the state of affairs recalled him thither. It was now nearly two

years ago that, on the 25th of October, 1555, and the 1st of January,

1556, Charles V. had solemnly abdicated all his dominions, giving over

to his son Philip the kingdom of Spain, with the sovereignty of Burgundy

and the Low Countries, and to his younger brother, Ferdinand, the empire

together with the original heritage of the House of Austria, and retiring

personally to the monastery of Yuste, in Estramadura, there to pass the

last years of his life, distracted with gout, at one time resting from

the world and its turmoil, at another vexing himself about what was doing

there now that he was no longer in it. Before abandoning it for good, he

desired to do his son Philip the service of leaving him, if not in a

state of definite peace, at any rate in a condition of truce with France.

Henry II. also desired rest; and the Constable de Montmorency wished

above everything for the release of his son Francis, who had been a

prisoner since the fall of Thorouanne. A truce for five years was signed

at Vaucelles on the 5th of February, 1556; and Coligny, quite young

still, but already admiral and in high esteem, had the conduct of the

negotiation. He found Charles V. dressed in mourning, seated beside a

little table, in a modest apartment hung with black. When the admiral

handed to the emperor the king’s letter, Charles could not himself break

the seal, and the Bishop of Arras drew near to render him that service.

“Gently, my Lord of Arras,” said the emperor; “would you rob me of the

duty I am bound to discharge towards the king my brother-in-law? Please

God, none but I shall do it;” and then turning to Coligny, he said, “What

will you say of me, admiral? Am I not a pretty knight to run a course

and break a lance, I who can only with great difficulty open a letter?”

He inquired with an air of interest after Henry II.’s health, and boasted

of belonging himself, also, to the house of France through his

grandmother Mary of Burgundy. “I hold it to be an honor,” said he, “to

have issued, on the mother’s side, from the stock which wears and upholds

the most famous crown in the world.” His son Philip, who was but a

novice in kingly greatness, showed less courtesy and less good taste than

his father; he received the French ambassadors in a room hung with

pictures representing the battle of Pavia. There were some who concluded

from that that the truce would not be of long duration. [_Histoire

d’Espagne,_ by M. Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, t. viii. p. 64.]

And it was not long before their prognostication was verified. The

sending of the Duke of Guise into Italy, and the assistance he brought to

Pope Paul IV., then at war with the new King of Spain, Philip II., were

considered as a violation of the truce of Vaucelles. Henry II. had

expected as much, and had ordered Coligny, who was commanding in Picardy

and Flanders, to hold himself in readiness to take the field as soon as

he should be, if not forced, at any rate naturally called upon, by any

unforeseen event. It cost Coligny, who was a man of scrupulous honor, a

great struggle to lightly break a truce he had just signed; nevertheless,

in January, 1557, when he heard that the French were engaged in Italy in

the war between the pope and the Spaniards, he did not consider that he

could possibly remain inactive in Flanders. He took by surprise the town

of Lens, between Lille and Arras. Philip II., on his side, had taken

measures for promptly entering upon the campaign. By his marriage with

Mary Tudor, Queen of England, he had secured for himself a powerful ally

in the north; the English Parliament were but little disposed to

compromise themselves in a war with France; but in March, 1557, Philip

went to London; the queen’s influence and the distrust excited in England

by Henry II. prevailed over the pacific desires of the nation; and Mary

sent a simple herald to carry to the King of France at Rheims her

declaration of war. Henry accepted it politely, but resolutely.

“I speak to you in this way,” said he to the herald, “because it is a

queen who sends you; had it been a king, I would speak to you in a very

different tone;” and he ordered him to be gone forthwith from the

kingdom. A negotiation was commenced for accomplishing the marriage,

long since agreed upon, between the young Queen of Scotland, Mary Stuart,

and Henry II.’s son, Francis, dauphin of France. Mary, who was born on

the 8th of December, 1542, at Falkland Castle in Scotland, had, since

1548, lived and received her education at the court of France, whither

her mother, Mary of Lorraine, eldest sister of Francis of Guise and

queen-dowager of Scotland, had lost no time in sending her as soon as the

future union between the two children had been agreed upon between the

two courts. The dauphin of France was a year younger than the Scottish

princess; but “from his childhood,” says the Venetian Capello, “he has

been very much in love with her Most Serene little Highness the Queen of

Scotland, who is destined for his wife. It sometimes happens that, when

they are exchanging endearments, they like to retire quite apart into a

corner of the rooms, that their little secrets may not be overheard.” On

the 19th of April, 1558, the espousals took place in the great hall of

the Louvre, and the marriage was celebrated in the church of Notre-Dame.

[Illustration: Francis II. and Mary Stuart love making----251]

From that time Mary Stuart was styled in France queen-dauphiness, and her

husband, with the authorization of the Scottish commissioners, took the

title of king-dauphin. “Etiquette required at that time that the heir to

the throne should hold his court separately, and not appear at the king’s

court save on grand occasions. The young couple resigned themselves

without any difficulty to this exile, and retired to Villers-Cotterets.”

[_Histoire de Marie Stuart,_ by Jules Gauthier, t. i. p. 36.]

Whilst preparations were being made at Paris for the rejoicings in honor

of the union of the two royal children, war broke out in Picardy and

Flanders. Philip II. had landed there with an army of forty-seven

thousand men, of whom seven thousand were English. Never did any great

sovereign and great politician provoke and maintain for long such

important wars without conducting them in some other fashion than from

the recesses of his cabinet, and without ever having exposed his own life

on the field of battle. The Spanish army was under the orders of

Emmanuel-Philibert, Duke of Savoy, a young warrior of thirty, who had won

the confidence of Charles V. He led it to the siege of Saint-Quentin,

a place considered as one of the bulwarks of the kingdom. Philip II.

remained at some leagues’ distance in the environs. Henry II. was ill

prepared for so serious an attack; his army, which was scarcely twenty

thousand strong, mustered near Laon under the orders of the Duke of

Nevers, governor of Champagne; at the end of July, 1557, it hurried into

Picardy, under the command of the Constable de Montmorency, who was

supported by Admiral de Coligny, his nephew, by the Duke of Enghien, by

the Prince of Condo, and by the Duke of Montpensier, by nearly all the

great lords and valiant warriors of France; they soon saw that Saint-

Quentin was in a deplorable state of defence; the fortifications were old

and badly kept up; soldiers, munitions of war, and victuals were all

equally deficient. Coligny did not hesitate, however he threw himself

into the place on the 2d of August, during the night, with a small corps

of seven hundred men and Saint-Remy, a skilful engineer, who had already

distinguished himself in the defence of Metz; the admiral packed off the

useless mouths, repaired the walls at the points principally threatened,

and reanimated the failing courage of the inhabitants. The constable and

his army came within hail of the place; and D’Andelot, Coligny’s brother,

managed with great difficulty to get four hundred and fifty men into it.

On the 10th of August the battle was begun between the two armies. The

constable affected to despise the Duke of Savoy’s youth. “I will soon

show him,” said he, “a move of an old soldier.” The French army, very

inferior in numbers, was for a moment on the point of being surrounded.

The Prince of Conde sent the constable warning. “I was serving in the

field,” answered Montmorency, “before the Prince of Conde came into the

world; I have good hopes of still giving him lessons in the art of war

for some years to come.” The valor of the constable and his comrades in

arms could not save them from the consequences of their stubborn

recklessness and their numerical inferiority; the battalions of Gascon

infantry closed their ranks, with pikes to the front, and made an heroic

resistance, but all in vain, against repeated charges of the Spanish

cavalry: and the defeat was total. More than three thousand men were

killed; the number of prisoners amounted to double; and the constable,

left upon the field with his thigh shattered by a cannon-ball, fell into

the hands of the Spaniards, as was also the case with the Dukes of

Longueville and Montpensier, La Rochefoucauld, D’Aubigne, &c. . . .

The Duke of Enghien, Viscount de Turenne, and a multitude of others, many

great names amidst a host of obscure, fell in the fight. The Duke of

Nevers and the Prince of Conde, sword in hand, reached La Fere with the

remnants of their army. Coligny remained alone in Saint-Quentin with

those who survived of his little garrison, and a hundred and twenty

arquebusiers whom the Duke of Nevers threw into the place at a loss of

three times as many. Coligny held out for a fortnight longer, behind

walls that were in ruins and were assailed by a victorious army. At

length, on the 27th of August, the enemy entered Saint-Quentin by shoals.

“The admiral, who was still going about the streets with a few men to

make head against them, found himself hemmed in on all sides, and did all

he could to fall into the hands of a Spaniard, preferring rather to await

on the spot the common fate than to incur by flight any shame and

reproach. He who took him prisoner, after having set him to rest a while

at the foot of the ramparts, took him away to their camp, where, as he

entered, he met Captain Alonzo de Cazieres, commandant of the old bands

of Spanish infantry, when up came the Duke of Savoy, who ordered the said

Cazieres to take the admiral to his tent.” [_Commentaire de Francois de

Rabutin sur les Guerres entre Henri II., roi de France, et Charles Quint,

empereur,_ t. ii. p. 95, in the _Petitot collection_.] D’Andelot, the

admiral’s brother, succeeded in escaping across the marshes. Being thus

master of Saint-Quentin, Philip II., after having attempted to put a stop

to carnage and plunder, expelled from the town, which was half in ashes,

the inhabitants who had survived; and the small adjacent fortresses, Ham

and Catelet, were not long before they surrendered.

Philip, with anxious modesty, sent information of his victory to his

father, Charles, who had been in retirement since February 21, 1556, at

the monastery of Yuste. “As I did not happen to be there myself,” he

said at the end of his letter, “about which I am heavy at heart as to

what your Majesty will possibly think, I can only tell you from hearsay

what took place.” We have not the reply of Charles V. to his son; but

his close confidant, Quejada, wrote, “The emperor felt at this news one

of the greatest thrills of satisfaction he has ever had; but, to tell you

the truth, I perceive by his manner that he cannot reconcile himself to

the thought that his son was not there; and with good reason.” After

that Saint-Quentin had surrendered, the Duke of Savoy wanted to march

forward and strike affrighted France to the very heart; and the aged

emperor was of his mind. “Is the king my son at Paris?” he said, when he

heard of his victory. Philip had thought differently about it instead of

hurling his army on Paris, he had moved it back to Saint-Quentin, and

kept it for the reduction of places in the neighborhood. “The

Spaniards,” says Rabutin, “might have accomplished our total

extermination, and taken from us all hope of setting ourselves up again.

. . . But the Supreme Ruler, the God of victories, pulled them up

quite short.” An unlooked-for personage, Queen Catherine de’ Medici,

then for the first time entered actively upon the scene. We borrow the

very words of the Venetian ambassadors who lived within her sphere. The

first, Lorenzo Contarini, wrote in 1552, “The queen is younger than the

king, but only thirteen days; she is not pretty, but she is possessed of

extraordinary wisdom and prudence; no doubt of her being fit to govern;

nevertheless she is not consulted or considered so much as she well might

be.” Five years later, in 1557, after the battle and capture of

Saint-Quentin, France was in a fit of stupor; Paris believed the enemy

to be already beneath her walls; many of the burgesses were packing up

and flying, some to Orleans, some to Bourges, some still farther. The

king had gone to Compiegne “to get together,” says Brantome, “a fresh

army.”

[Illustration: Catherine de’ Medici (in her young days)----255]

Queen Catherine was alone at Paris. Of her own motion “she went to the

Parliament (according to the _Memoires de la Chatre_ it was to the Hotel

de Ville that she went and made her address) in full state, accompanied

by the cardinals, princes, and princesses; and there, in the most

impressive language, she set forth the urgent state of affairs at the

moment. She pointed out that, in spite of the enormous expenses into

which the Most Christian king had found himself drawn in his late wars,

he had shown the greatest care not to burden the towns. In the

continuous and extreme pressure of requirements her Majesty did not think

that any further charge could be made on the people of the country

places, who in ordinary times always bear the greatest burden. With so

much sentiment and eloquence that she touched the heart of everybody, the

queen then explained to the Parliament that the king had need of three

hundred thousand livres, twenty-five thousand to be paid every two

months; and she added that she would retire from the place of session, so

as not to interfere with liberty of discussion; and she, accordingly,

retired to an adjoining room. A resolution to comply with the wishes of

her Majesty was voted, and the queen, having resumed her place, received

a promise to that effect. A hundred notables of the city offered to give

at once three thousand francs apiece. The queen thanked them in the

sweetest form of words; and thus terminated this session of Parliament

with so much applause for her Majesty and such lively marks of

satisfaction at her behavior that no idea can be given of them.

Throughout the whole city nothing was spoken of but the queen’s prudence

and the happy manner in which she proceeded in this enterprise.”

Such is the account, not of a French courtier, but of the Venetian

ambassador, Giacomo Lorenzo, writing confidentially to his government.

From that day the position of Catherine de’ Medici was changed in France,

amongst the people as well as at court. “The king went more often to see

her; he added to his habits that of holding court at her apartments for

about an hour every day after supper in the midst of the lords and

ladies.” It is not to be discovered anywhere in the contemporary

Memoires, whether Catherine had anything to do with the resolution taken

by Henry II. on returning from Compiegne; but she thenceforward assumed

her place, and gave a foretaste of the part she was to play in the

government of France. Unhappily for the honor of Catherine and for the

welfare of France, that part soon ceased to be judicious, dignified, and

salutary, as it had been on that day of its first exhibition.

On entering Paris again the king at once sent orders to the Duke of Guise

to return in haste from Italy with all the troops he could bring. Every

eye and every hope were fixed upon the able and heroic defender of Metz,

who had forced Charles V. to retreat before him. A general appeal was at

the same time addressed to “all soldiers, gentlemen and others, who had

borne or were capable of bearing arms, to muster at Laon under the Duke

of Nevers, in order to be employed for the service of the king and for

the tuition [protection] of their country, their families, and their

property.” Guise arrived on the 20th of October, 1557, at

Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where the court happened to be just then: every

mark of favor was lavished upon him; all the resources of the state were

put at his disposal; there was even some talk of appointing him viceroy;

but Henry II. confined himself to proclaiming him, on the very day of

his arrival, lieutenant-general of the armies throughout the whole

extent of the monarchy, both within and without the realm. His brother,

the Cardinal of Lorraine, who was as ambitious and almost as able as he,

had the chief direction in civil, financial, and diplomatic affairs;

never, since the great mayors-of-the-palace under the Merovingian kings,

had similar power been in the hands of a subject. Like a man born to

command, Guise saw that, in so complicated a situation, a brilliant

stroke must be accomplished and a great peril be met by a great success.

“He racked his brains for all sorts of devices for enabling him to do

some remarkable deed which might humble the pride of that haughty

Spanish nation and revive the courage of his own men; and he took it

that those things which the enemy considered as the most secure would be

the least carefully guarded. Some years previously it had been

suggested to the constable that an attempt might be made upon Calais,

negligently guarded as it was, and the place itself not being in good

order. The Duke of Guise put the idea of this enterprise forward once

more, and begged the king’s permission to attempt it, without saying a

word about it to anybody else, which the king considered to be a very

good notion.” Guise took the command of the army, and made a feint of

directing its movements towards an expedition in the east of the

kingdom; but, suddenly turning westwards, he found himself on the night

of January 1, 1558, beneath the walls of Calais, “whither, with right

good will, all the princes, lords, and soldiers had marched.” On the 3d

of January he took the two forts of Nieullay and Risbank, which covered

the approaches to the place. On the 4th he prepared for, and on the 6th

he delivered, the assault upon the citadel itself, which was carried; he

left there his brother, the Duke of Aumale, with a sufficient force for

defence; the portion of the English garrison which had escaped at the

assault fell back within the town; the governor, Lord Wentworth, “like a

man in desperation, who saw he was all but lost,” made vain attempts to

recover this important post under cover of night and of the high sea,

which rendered impossible the prompt arrival of any aid for the French;

but “they held their own inside the castle.” The English requested the

Duke of Aumale “to parley so as to come to some honorable and reasonable

terms;” and Guise assented. On the 8th of January, whilst he was

conferring in his tent with the representatives of the governor,

Coligny’s brother, D’Andelot, entered the town at the solicitation of

the English themselves, who were afraid of being all put to the sword.

The capitulation was signed. The inhabitants, with their wives and

children, had their lives spared, and received permission to leave

Calais freely and without any insult, and withdraw to England or

Flanders. Lord Wentworth and fifty other persons, to be chosen by the

Duke of Guise, remained prisoners of war; with this exception, all the

soldiers were to return to England, but with empty hands. The place was

left with all the cannons, arms, munitions, utensils, engines of war,

flags and standards which happened to be in it. The furniture, the gold

and silver, coined or other, the merchandise, and the horses passed over

to the disposal of the Duke of Guise. Lastly the vanquished, when they

quitted the town, were to leave it intact, having no power to pull down

houses, unpave streets, throw up earth, displace a single stone, pull

out a single nail. The conqueror’s precautions were as deliberate as

his audacity had been sudden. On the 9th of January, 1558, after a

week’s siege, Calais, which had been in the hands of the English for two

hundred and ten years, once more became a French town, in spite of the

inscription which was engraved on one of its gates, and which may be

turned into the following distich:--

“A siege of Calais may seem good

When lead and iron swim like wood.”

The joy was so much the greater in that it was accompanied by great

surprise: save a few members of the king’s council, nobody expected this

conquest. “I certainly thought that you must be occupied in preparing

for some great exploit, and that you wished to wait until you could

apprise me of the execution rather than the design,” wrote Marshal de

Brissac to the Duke of Guise, on the 22d of January, from Italy.

Foreigners were not less surprised than the French themselves; they had

supposed that France would remain for a long while under the effects of

the reverse experienced at Saint-Quentin. “The loss of Calais,” said

Pope Paul IV., “will be the only dowry that the Queen of England will

obtain from her marriage with Philip. For France such a conquest is

preferable to that of half the kingdom of England.” When Mary Tudor,

already seriously ill, heard the news, she exclaimed from her deathbed,

on the 20th of January, “If my heart is opened, there will be found

graven upon it the word Calais.” And when the Grand Prior of France, on

repairing to the court of his sister, Mary of Lorraine, in Scotland, went

to visit Queen Elizabeth, who had succeeded Mary Tudor, she, after she

had made him dance several times with her, said to him, “My dear prior, I

like you very much, but not your brother, who robbed me of my town of

Calais.”

Guise was one of those who knew that it is as necessary to follow up a

success accomplished as to proceed noiselessly in the execution of a

sudden success. When he was master of Calais he moved rapidly upon the

neighboring fortresses of Guines and Ham; and he had them in his power

within a few days, notwithstanding a resistance more stout than he had

encountered at Calais. During the same time the Duke of Nevers,

encouraged by such examples, also took the field again, and gained

possession, in Champagne and the neighborhood, of the strong castles of

Herbemont, Jamoigne, Chigny, Rossignol, and Villemont. Guise had no idea

of contenting himself with his successes in the west of France; his

ambition carried him into the east also, to the environs of Metz, the

scene of his earliest glory. He heard that Vieilleville, who had become

governor of Metz, was setting about the reduction of Thionville, “the

best picture of a fortress I ever saw,” says Montluc. “I have heard,”

wrote Guise to Vieilleville, “that you have a fine enterprise on hand; I

pray you do not commence the execution of it, in any fashion whatever,

until I be with you: having given a good account of Calais and Guines, as

lieutenant-general of his Majesty in this realm, I should be very vexed

if there should be done therein anything of honor and importance without

my presence.” He arrived before Thionville on the 4th of June, 1558.

Vieilleville and his officers were much put out at his interference.

“The duke might surely have dispensed with coming,” said D’Estrees, chief

officer of artillery; “it will be easy for him to swallow what is all

chewed ready for him.” But the bulk of the army did not share this

feeling of jealousy. When the pioneers, drawn up, caught sight of Guise,

“Come on, sir,” they cried, “come and let us die before Thionville; we

have been expecting you this long while.” The siege lasted three weeks

longer. Guise had with him two comrades of distinction, the Italian

Peter Strozzi, and the Gascon Blaise do Montluc. On the 20th of June

Strozzi was mortally wounded by an arquebuse-shot, at the very side of

Guise, who was talking to him with a hand upon his shoulder. “Ah! by

God’s head, sir,” cried Strozzi, in Italian, “the king to-day loses a

good servant, and so does your excellency.” Guise, greatly moved,

attempted to comfort him, and spoke to him the name of Jesus Christ; but

Strozzi was one of those infidels so common at that time in Italy.

“‘Sdeath,” said he, “what Jesus are you come hither to remind me of?

I believe in no God; my game is played.” “You will appear to-day before

His face,” persisted Guise, in the earnestness of his faith. “‘Sdeath,”

replied Strozzi, “I shall be where all the others are who have died in

the last six thousand years.” The eyes of Guise remained fixed a while

upon his comrade dying in such a frame of mind; but he soon turned all

his thoughts once more to the siege of Thionville. Montluc supported him

valiantly. A strong tower still held out, and Montluc carried it at the

head of his men. Guise rushed up and threw his arm round the warrior’s

neck, saying, “Monseigneur, I now see clearly that the old proverb is

quite infallible: ‘A good horse will go to the last.’ I am off at once to

my quarters to report the capture to the king. Be assured that I shall

not conceal from him the service you have done.” The reduction of

Thionville was accomplished on that very day, June 22, 1558. That of

Arlon, a rich town in the neighborhood, followed very closely. Guise,

thoroughly worn out, had ordered the approaches to be made next morning

at daybreak, requesting that he might be left to sleep until he awoke of

himself; when he did awake, he inquired whether the artillery had yet

opened fire; he was told that Montluc had surprised the place during the

night. “That is making the pace very fast,” said he, as he made the sign

of the cross; but he did not care to complain about it. Under the

impulse communicated by him the fortunes of France were reviving

everywhere. A check received before Gravelines, on the 13th of July,

1558, by a division commanded by De Termes, governor of Calais, did not

subdue the national elation and its effect upon the enemy themselves.

“It is an utter impossibility for me to keep up the war,” wrote Philip

II., on the 15th of February, 1559, to Granvelle. On both sides there

was a desire for peace; and conferences were opened at Cateau-Cambresis.

On the 6th of February, 1559, a convention was agreed upon for a truce

which was to last during the whole course of the negotiation, and for six

days after the separation of the plenipotentiaries, in case no peace took

place.

It was concluded on the 2d of April, 1559, between Henry II. and

Elizabeth, who had become Queen of England at the death of her sister

Mary (November 17, 1558); and next day, April 3, between Henry II.,

Philip II., and the allied princes of Spain, amongst others the Prince of

Orange, William the Silent, who, whilst serving in the Spanish army, was

fitting himself to become the leader of the Reformers, and the liberator

of the Low Countries. By the treaty with England, France was to keep

Calais for eight years in the first instance, and on a promise to pay

five hundred thousand gold crowns to Queen Elizabeth or her successors.

The money was never paid, and Calais was never restored, and this without

the English government’s having considered that it could make the matter

a motive for renewing the war. By the treaty with Spain, France was to

keep Metz, Toul, and Verdun, and have back Saint-Quentin, Le Catelet, and

Ham; but she was to restore to Spain or her allies a hundred and

eighty-nine places in Flanders, Piedmont, Tuscany, and Corsica. The

malcontents--for the absence of political liberty does not suppress

them entirely--raised their voices energetically against this last

treaty signed by the king, with the sole desire, it was supposed, of

obtaining the liberation of his two favorites, the Constable de

Montmorency and Marshal de Saint-Andre, who had been prisoners in Spain

since the defeat at Saint-Quentin. “Their ransom,” it was said, “has

cost the kingdom more than that of Francis I.” Guise himself said to

the king, “A stroke of your Majesty’s pen costs more to France than

thirty years of war cost.” Ever since that time the majority of

historians, even the most enlightened, have joined in the censure that

was general in the sixteenth century; but their opinion will not be

indorsed here; the places which France had won during the war, and which

she retained by the peace,--Metz, Toul, and Verdun on her frontier in

the north-east, facing the imperial or Spanish possessions, and Boulogne

and Calais on her coasts in the north-west, facing England,--were, as

regarded the integrity of the state and the security of the inhabitants,

of infinitely more importance than those which she gave up in Flanders

and Italy. The treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, too, marked the termination

of those wars of ambition and conquest which the Kings of France had

waged beyond the Alps an injudicious policy, which, for four reigns, had

crippled and wasted the resources of France in adventurous expeditions,

beyond the limits of her geographical position and her natural and

permanent interests.

More or less happily, the treaty of Cateau-Cambreis had regulated all

those questions of external policy which were burdensome to France; she

was once more at peace with her neighbors, and seemed to have nothing

more to do than to gather in the fruits thereof. But she had in her own

midst questions far more difficult of solution than those of her external

policy, and these perils from within were threatening her more seriously

than any from without. Since the death of Francis I., the religious

ferment had pursued its course, becoming more general and more fierce;

the creed of the Reformers had spread very much; their number had very

much increased; permanent churches, professing and submitting to a fixed

faith and discipline, had been founded; that of Paris was the first, in

1555; and the example had been followed at Orleans, at Chartres, at

Lyons, at Toulouse, at Rochelle, in Normandy, in Touraine, in Guienne, in

Poitou, in Dauphiny, in Provence, and in all the provinces, more or less.

In 1561, it was calculated that there were twenty-one hundred and fifty

reformed, or, as the expression then was, rectified (dressees), churches.

“And this is no fanciful figure; it is the result of a census taken at

the instigation of the deputies who represented the reformed churches at

the conference of Poissy on the demand of Catherine de’ Medici, and in

conformity with the advice of Admiral de Coligny.” [_La Reformation en

France pendant sa premiere periode,_ by Henri Luttheroth, pp. 127-132.]

It is clear that the movement of the Reformation in the sixteenth century

was one of those spontaneous and powerful movements which have their

source and derive their strength from the condition of men’s souls and

of whole communities, and not merely from the personal ambitions and

interests which soon come and mingle with them, whether it be to promote

or to retard them. One thing has been already here stated and confirmed

by facts; it was specially in France that the Reformation had this truly

religious and sincere character; very far from supporting or tolerating

it, the sovereign and public authorities opposed it from its very birth;

under Francis I. it had met with no real defenders but its martyrs; and

it was still the same under Henry II. During the reign of Francis I.,

within a space of twenty-three years, there had been eighty-one capital

executions for heresy; during that of Henry II., twelve years, there were

ninety-seven for the same cause, and at one of these executions Henry II.

was present in person, on the space in front of Notre-Dame: a spectacle

which Francis I. had always refused to see. In 1551, 1557, and 1559,

Henry II., by three royal edicts, kept up and added to all the

prohibitions and penalties in force against the Reformers. In 1550, the

massacre of the Vaudians was still in such lively and odious remembrance

that a noble lady of Provence, Madame de Cental, did not hesitate to

present a complaint, in the name of her despoiled, proscribed, and

murdered vassals, against the Cardinal de Tournon, the Count de Grignan,

and the Premier President Maynier d’Oppede, as having abused, for the

purpose of getting authority for this massacre, the religious feelings of

the king, who on his death-bed had testified his remorse for it. “This

cause,” says De Thou, “was pleaded with much warmth, and occupied fifty

audiences, with a large concourse of people, but the judgment took all

the world by surprise. Guerin alone, advocate-general in 1545, having no

support at court, was condemned to death, and was scape-goat for all the

rest. D’Oppede defended himself with fanatical pride, saying that he

only executed the king’s orders, like Saul, whom God commanded to

exterminate the Amalekites. He had the Duke of Guise to protect him; and

he was sent back to discharge the duties of his office. Such was the

prejudice of the Parliament of Paris against the Reformers that it

interdicted the hedge-schools (_ecoles buissonnieres_), schools which the

Protestants held out in the country to escape from the jurisdiction of

the precentor of Notre-Dame de Paris, who had the sole supervision of

primary schools. Hence comes the proverb, to play truant (_faire l’ecole

buissonniere--to go to hedge school_). All the resources of French civil

jurisdiction appeared to be insufficient against the Reformers. Henry

II. asked the pope for a bull, transplanting into France the Spanish

Inquisition, the only real means of extirpating the root of the errors.”

It was the characteristic of this Inquisition, that it was completely in

the hands of the clergy, and that its arm was long enough to reach the

lay and the clerical indifferently. Pope Paul IV. readily gave the king,

in April, 1557, the bull he asked for, but the Parliament of Paris

refused to enregister the royal edict which gave force in France to the

pontifical brief. In 1559 the pope replied to this refusal by a bull

which comprised in one and the same anathema all heretics, though they

might be kings or emperors, and declared them to have “forfeited their

benefices, states, kingdoms, or empires, the which should devolve on the

first to seize them, without power on the part of the Holy See itself to

restore them.” [_Magnum Bullarium Romanum, a Beato Leone Magno ad

Paulum IV.,_ t. i. p. 841: Luxembourg, 1742.] The Parliament would not

consent to enregister the decree unless there were put in it a condition

to the effect that clerics alone should be liable to the inquisition, and

that the judges should be taken from amongst the clergy of France. For

all their passionate opposition to the Reformation, the Magistrates had

no idea of allowing either the kingship or France to fall beneath the

yoke of the papacy.

Amidst all these disagreements and distractions in the very heart of

Catholicism, the Reformation went on growing from day to day. In 1558,

Lorenzo, the Venetian ambassador, set down even then the number of the

Reformers at four hundred thousand. In 1559, at the death of Henry II.,

Claude Haton, a priest and contemporary chronicler on the Catholic side,

calculated that they were nearly a quarter of the population of France.

They held at Paris, in May, 1559, their first general synod; and eleven

fully established churches sent deputies to it. This synod drew up a

form of faith called the Gallican Confession, and likewise a form of

discipline. “The burgess-class, for a long while so indifferent to the

burnings that took place, were astounded at last at the constancy with

which the pile was mounted by all those men and all those women who had

nothing to do but to recant in order to save their lives. Some could not

persuade themselves that people so determined were not in the right;

others were moved with compassion. ‘Their very hearts,’ say

contemporaries, ‘wept together with their eyes.’” It needed only an

opportunity to bring these feelings out. Some of the faithful one day in

the month of May, 1558, on the public walk in the Pre-aux-Clercs, began

to sing the psalms of Marot. Their singing had been forbidden by the

Parliament of Bordeaux, but the practice of singing those psalms had but

lately been so general that it could not be looked upon as peculiar to

heretics. All who happened to be there, suddenly animated by one and the

same feeling, joined in with the singers, as if to protest against the

punishments which were being repeated day after day. This manifestation

was renewed on the following days. The King of Navarre, Anthony de

Bourbon, Prince Louis de Conde, his brother, and many lords took part in

it together with a crowd, it is said, of five or six thousand persons.

It was not in the Pre-aux-Clercs only and by singing that this new state

of mind revealed itself amongst the highest classes as well as amongst

the populace. The Queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret, in her early youth,

“was as fond of a ball as of a sermon,” says Brantome, “and she had

advised her spouse, Anthony de Bourbon, who inclined towards Calvinism,

not to perplex himself with all these opinions.” In 1559 she was

passionately devoted to the faith and the cause of the Reformation. With

more levity, but still in sincerity, her brother-in-law, Louis de Conde,

put his ambition and his courage at the service of the same cause.

Admiral de Coligny’s youngest brother, Francis d’Andelot, declared

himself a Reformer to Henry II. himself, who, in his wrath, threw a plate

at his head, and sent him to prison in the castle of Melun. Coligny

himself, who had never disguised the favorable sentiments he felt towards

the Reformers, openly sided with them on the ground of his own personal

faith, as well as of the justice due to them. At last the Reformation

had really great leaders, men who had power and were experienced in the

affairs of the world; it was becoming a political party as well as a

religious conviction; and the French Reformers were henceforth in a

condition to make war as well as die at the stake for their faith.

Hitherto they had been only believers and martyrs; they became the

victors and the vanquished, alternately, in a civil war.

A new position for them, and as formidable as it was grand. It was

destined to bring upon them cruel trials and the worth of them in

important successes; first, the Saint-Bartholomew, then the accession of

Henry IV. and the edict of Nantes. At a later period, under Louis XIII.

and Louis XIV., the complication of the religious question and the

political question cost them the advantages they had won; the edict of

Nantes disappeared together with the power of the Protestants in the

state. They were no longer anything but heretics and rebels. A day was

to come, when, by the force alone of moral ideas, and in the name alone

of conscience and justice, they would recover all the rights they had for

a time possessed, and more also; but in the sixteenth century that day

was still distant, and armed strife was for the Reformers their only

means of defence and salvation. God makes no account of centuries, and a

great deal is required before the most certain and the most salutary

truths get their place and their rights in the minds and communities of

men.

On the 29th of June, 1559, a brilliant tournament was celebrated in lists

erected at the end of the street of Saint-Antoine, almost at the foot of

the Bastille. Henry II., the queen, and the whole court had been present

at it for three days. The entertainment was drawing to a close. The

king, who had run several tilts “like a sturdy and skilful cavalier,”

wished to break yet another lance, and bade the Count de Montgomery,

captain of the guards, to run against him. Montgomery excused himself;

but the king insisted. The tilt took place. The two jousters, on

meeting, broke their lances skilfully; but Montgomery forgot to drop at

once, according to usage, the fragment remaining in his hand; he

unintentionally struck the king’s helmet and raised the visor, and a

splinter of wood entered Henry’s eye, who fell forward upon his horse’s

neck. All the appliances of art were useless; the brain had been

injured. Henry II. languished for eleven days, and expired on the 10th

of July, 1559, aged forty years and some months. An insignificant man,

and a reign without splendor, though fraught with facts pregnant of grave

consequences.

[Illustration: Joust between Henri II. and Count de Montgomery----268]